Comment

Plenty of bandwidth was spilled again this week as we took delivery of beta 2 for all the things. I usually wait until beta 4 or so before putting it on my primary device, but this year I decided to jump in early with beta 1, and I've been pleasantly surprised with the stability of it! That's not to say there aren't bugs, because there definitely are, but it's not too bad. 😀

The public beta for iOS and macOS also launched this week, which seems a little eager, even if it is reasonably stable. At least you won't be flooded with 1 star reviews anymore though, so there shouldn't be too much to worry about with the reputation of your apps.

There's also a new "Feedback" app, installed by default in this release. Unfortunately I couldn't get logged into it, maybe because my Apple ID isn't registered for the public beta? Still, we've always got Radar. 🚀

Dave Verwer

News

Kate Stone on the official Apple Swift blog announcing that playground support is being added for versions of Swift that don't ship alongside an Xcode release. From now on, future snapshots of the language can now be plugged into Xcode 8 and used in a playground. Great news!

I really liked this post by Jesse Squires on how he's not sad that Swift 3 has sherlocked some of his Swift 2.x code. I agree that we should celebrate every time this happens as it means the core language is still changing and getting better. 🎉

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Tools

Felix Krause with a set of guides covering all things code signing. They obviously talk in part about fastlane, but even if you're not using it there's plenty of great information here. They're written for both Xcode 7 and 8, so no matter what you're using right now there's something here that'll help either with your setup, or with diagnosing problems.

Code

The war is over and Auto Layout won, right? Probably. But what if you find that your layout code needs to be orders of magnitude faster? That's not going to be a huge problem for relatively simple apps, but what if you're building something like the LinkedIn news feed? Nick Snyder and Sergei Taguer have put together a new library called LayoutKit which they used to do exactly that. It's almost as fast as manual layout, but with much easier management.

I missed this when it first got released but if you're looking for an iOS 9 compatible version of the new pre-fetching features of UICollectionView and UITableView, then you're in luck. Alexander Grebenyuk put together this library which does exactly that.

Keith Harrison on the new requirement in iOS 10 to declare up front which private data your app is going to attempt to access. This feels a little like Android where all of the access required is declared before launch, and is even listed in the Google Play store before installation. I wonder if the App Store is going to get a similar feature. Seems like a good idea.